Old Mutare Mission was our first stop to see what the United Methodist Church is doing to help people in Zimbabwe. It is called Old Mutare because the site of the mission was the original location for the town of Mutare, but the actual city was moved when the supplies needed to build the town couldn't be hauled over the mountains from Mozambique. The area was given to a missionary and ever since has belonged to the Methodist Church in Zimbabwe for mission work. It is a large area and holds many different buildings and programs. We were fortunate to visit many of these while there.
Our first stop was the Old Mutare Waiting Mothers Shelter. We met 16 women in their last weeks of pregnancy. They come to live at the Waiting Mothers Shelter so they can be close to a hospital when they give birth to receive good medical assistance and eliminate problems that can be deadly when delivering a baby in more remote areas of the country. They were very happy to take photos with us and let us see their temporary housing. Their make-do shelter has no toilets or water nearby, no electricity and no kitchen for cooking food yet they still stay there for their babies safe deliveries. The head nurse that gave us our tour let us know that they would very much like to provide a kitchen for these mothers to cook their own food and have electricity for a fridge so they can store extra food that they cook. As you can see in the photo below they have lanterns they can use that are solar powered.
Next we toured the Old Mutare Hospital right next door. There was an unbelievably long line of people waiting to be seen by one of two doctors. The doctors that work here are truly a gift from God working long days helping people who have walked many miles to receive medical care. The biggest challenge for these doctors is not having enough electricity to keep the pumps running to provide water from their bore holes during the day.
Next we were able to visit the maternity ward and see 2 and 3 day old babies and their mothers who graciously allowed some of our team members to hold the cute little babies. Loree and Annette couldn't resist the urge to hold these new little bundles of joy!
Next it was time for us to listen to a talk on maternal health from a female doctor who is an Ob/Gyn and has helped her fellow Zimbabwean women deliver babies for years. She brought us up to speed on the challenges she has faced daily in helping women during their pregnancies. There are many barriers to a successful delivery and some of those are lack of funds to pay clinic fees, midwives and nurses not trained to spot pregnancy complications early on, lack of transportation to get to a clinic or hospital when a delivery becomes problematic, etc. She has seen too many women and babies die due to complications that could have been prevented early on. The current nurses in Zimbabwe are paid very little and overworked with too many patients for each nurse. She is advocating for a better salary and benefits for nurses to keep them from going and working in neighboring countries and keep more around so their are fewer patients to each nurse. She is also advocating more training for midwives to spot high risk pregnancies early on and inform the mothers the options they have available to them to make sure they can be in a hospital facility that can assist them with a safe delivery. She was very passionate and knowledgeable and helped us understand why the life expectantcy rate is so low in Zimbabwe. There are too many women and babies dying during childbirth.
We also received some insight into the AIDS/HIV crisis in Zimbabwe from this doctor. Fortunately, people are no longer being quiet about HIV and how it spreads so they have seen the number of infected people going down. However, in this country's culture the man is the head of the household and the group of people that are still being infected are married men and women. This is mostly due to infidelity in a marriage. If a wife suspects that her husband is having intercourse with someone else she can ask her husband to wear a condom during sex, but if he says no then she must have sex with him without a condom and risk becoming infected.
After this informative discussion we got to visit the Tairo Project. The Methodist Church trains people who have HIV to sew and make items such as bags, purses, bookmarks, wall hangings, clothing, etc that they can sell in order to support themselves and their families. We met a man who had been trained and was using their hand crank sewing machine to sew some items. Some of us took advantage of our first opportunity to shop and buy local made items that would support our church's mission.
The mission hospital also had vegetable gardens, a dental clinic and so much more. It was humbling to see all the good work being done by the Zimbabwe Methodist Church in Old Mutare. They are helping so many people in so many different ways.
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